Managing a high volume of comments

Comments make up an integral part of the feedback you receive from employees. They provide context to the driver scores and help you uncover underlying issues, which can help inform your action planning.  If you have a large organization, you may have a very big volume of written feedback, and reviewing it may become an overwhelming experience. This article provides some best practices on how to deal with many comments and where to focus your efforts.

View the comments for Strengths & Priorities

Addressing the priorities is a key part of improving your team's engagement. To understand the underlying issues behind any priority, we recommend the following click path:

• Click into one of the drivers that has been identified as a priority on your dashboard. This will open up the dashboard for this particular driver.
• Scroll down to view the comments associated with this driver. This will help uncover the underlying issues on why employees feel this way about the driver
• You can then click on the comments icon at the bottom of the comments list which will open up the comments page with a filtered view of all the comments for that particular driver
• Once the comments have been reviewed for the driver marked as a priority, we suggest adding some actions to address the driver.

Review your highlighted comments

Highlighted comments appear at the top of your comments page and are marked as "Highlighted". These are comments that Peakon has identified as being particularly useful because they meet the following three conditions:

• They contain direct advice. This means that they contain words such as "could" or "should" etc.
• They contain extreme scores for the question the comment was left on (high or low)
• They contain around 140 characters, which typically makes for a more useful comment
• Highlighted comments are particularly useful when dealing with large volumes of comments, for example, a manager or admin member who has access to all segment data or to large segments of employees.

Understand your organization trends via topics 

Topics are generated once enough comments have been collected for each driver question. Topics categorize your comments into common themes that Peakon identifies from your comments. This means that you can easily work through a large volume of comments by looking at the identified topics.

Managers of small teams will typically not have any topics populate on their dashboard, so this feature is more for managers with access to all segment data or larger segments of employees.

Topics are generated based on comments going back three months meaning they remain relevant and should help inform your action planning efforts.

Use the filtering and sorting options 

Managers of smaller teams where no topics have been generated are generally able to read through all comments. Peakon recommends following the click path of opening up the dashboard for those drivers that have been identified as priorities and viewing those comments in the context of the driver before creating an action plan in the Improve area.

It's also possible to access all the comments from the comments option. This will then show a list of all comments with the Highlighted comments appearing first.

The filter and sorting options at the top of the page allow you to filter on comments by:

• Driver questions, open-ended questions, value questions
• Score category: promotor, passive, detractor
• Specific driver, open-ended, or value question
• Interaction (conversations)
• Acknowledgement
• Sorting options: highlighted, date, and score
• Search box to search for specific terms
• Sensitive comments filtering by group

These filtering, sorting, and search options allow you to easily group comments together in a way that can help you manage your comments.

Some clients encourage their managers to use the acknowledgement and conversation features on comments. In this case, a manager may find it useful to filter on those comments with no acknowledgement or interaction, for example.